Boys Go to Jupiter: A Bizarre Animation About the Gig Economy and its Gen-Z Servants
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B+
Action, fantasy, romance, comedy, crime and horror are still the go-to genres dominating the contemporary box office and streaming. Which makes it seem noteworthy that Boys Go to Jupiter is the second film in two weeks — following French director Boris Lojkine’s Souleyman’s Story — focusing on a humbler subject: gig workers who deliver food to your door.
Why now? Since the pandemic, there has been a growing body of academic research that suggests these kinds of gigs represent the future of work, where flexibility and autonomy comes at the cost of app-driven surveillance, low wages, no benefits and personal risk
Boys Go to Jupiter, the debut feature film from American 3-D animator, video game designer, and illustrator Julian Glander, is both jaded and fresh, a Gen-Z version of Richard Linklater’s early slacker comedies with a sprinkling of Studio Ghibli’s childlike fantasy.
Whipped together in 90 days with the free, open-source animation software Blender, the film has the lo-fi plastic look of a vintage video game and a script that balances casual plotting with sharp dialogue.
The setting is suburban Florida, between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. It’s portrayed as a limbo of faded pastel colours, empty pools, and parking lots, with billboards offering evangelical warnings about get-rich schemes.
There’s a kitschy dinosaur-themed mini-golf with a gravestone in it, an egg farm where the hens sit on golf balls, and the area’s main industry — a giant juice company, Dolphin Grove — that experiments with genetically altered fruit. Dr. Dolphin, the possibly mad scientist owner of the place, is voiced by Janeane Garafalo, leading a cast of young comic actors including Julio Torres, Sarah Sherman, and Joe Pera.
The protagonist is Billy 5000 (Jack Corbett), a jaded 16-year-old who makes food deliveries on his hoverboard, for a company called Grubster, whose motto is “Have a grubby day.”
He doesn’t work for them, he insists but shares in a “flexible delivery partnership.” A high-school math whiz, he’s attempting to use a dubious currency exchange scam to earn $5,000 to make a down payment on a home so he can stop living in the garage of his older sister, an ER nurse and single parent, who doesn’t know that he has dropped out of school.
In his pursuit of his nest egg, Billy has little time for his friends, including the ever-shirtless Freckles (Grace Kuhlenschmidt), an aspiring rapper who, mid-film, decides to become a plaintive songwriter. (Boys Go to Jupiter is also a pop musical, with all songs written by Glander.) Most of the time, Billy is gazing at his phone screen, monitoring it for nearby delivery opportunities or seeking inspiration from a financial guru on app.
Boys Go to Jupiter is a serious, though never earnest, critique of capitalism. One day Billy makes a delivery to the Dolphin Grove juice company labs, where he meets Rozebud (singer Miya Folick), who he knew from school. (She remembers him as “the human caterpillar.” “Human calculator,” he corrects her.)
Now, she’s the bored young heiress to the juice fortune, but also a self-styled revolutionary, determined to break the system from within by not doing any work. She provides Billy with a trendy academic leftist manifesto entitled “Economics without economies,” which describes workers as scrambling drone ants — several high camera angles confirm this perspective — and a few quietly observant snails. “It goes without saying” the book suggests, that the snails are economists such as the author.
The film’s mordant tone has a flipside, a sugary fantasy of escape, which features a couple of subterranean alien creatures the size and colour of party balloons who speak in eager gibberish.
One is a juvenile creature that looks like a blue disc named Donut who has imprinted himself on Billy, but Dr. Dolphin is also intent on possessing it. The other is a worm-like creature that helps provide the film’s absurd ending: an escape from reality as arbitrary as a dream, a drug trip or sudden mental derangement.
The point, inasmuch as there is one, is that Billy is magically cured of his addiction to a system that is programmed against people like him from winning. The kicker is that no real-life alternative is offered.
Boys Go to Jupiter. Written and directed by Julian Glander. Starring Jack Corbett, Grace Kuhlenschmidt, Elsie Fisher and Janeane Garofalo. At Toronto’s TIFF Lightbox and Fox Theatre August 15; at Halifax’s Carbon Arc Cinema August 23; and at Edmonton’s Metro Cinema and and Vancouver's The Rio August 25.